As you know, I frequently write about my husband and our marriage in this blog. John reads all of my posts and I am very grateful to him for supporting the level of personal information I share about our lives. He’s never expressed hurt or anger with anything with anything I’ve written. He did disagree with something I wrote about myself, namely when I referred to myself as a “drama queen”. John told me that I was an “anti-drama queen” and that this is actually somewhat annoying to him at times. Although I was happy to hear that my husband views me as having good emotion management skills, I was kind of shocked. I was so shocked that I actually asked him to tell me what he thought a “drama queen” was just to make sure we talking about the same thing. And we were talking about the same thing except when I gave him the example of losing my cool when I come home to a sink full of dishes that he was supposed to do days earlier, he said this was “nagging” rather than being a “drama queen”. Okay, I can work with that. So I’m not exactly Spock. I’m a Spock who also nags on occasion.

When I was first diagnosed with breast cancer, I read a number of memoirs of other women who have had it. The most helpful of them was one that was written by a woman and her husband, both of whom are professional authors. It was clear that they had a loving marriage. It was also clear that cancer had thrown their lives upside down. Their stories were told in tandem with each set of chapters written about the same time period but from their different perspectives.

Yesterday I remembered that book. I asked John if he would write a guest post for my blog. We discussed a few ideas and he indicated that he was interested and that he wanted to think about what to write. I think he will do it and I’m pretty excited about it. My husband and I met in a writing class at the University of Washington. We both love to write. When I first met him, I thought he was an English major and was surprised that he was getting a computer science degree. Both he and I took a number of creative writing classes in college, though not the same ones. John’s mother is a published poet who founded a writing conference in eastern Washington state that ran for several years. John still writes poetry and occasionally gives readings at local coffee shops. A few years ago, he and his friend, Rex had a booth at Artopia, one of the Seattle neighborhood arts festival. I thought the idea of a poetry booth was a little crazy given the venue and especially since they were planning to write lines of their poetry ON PEOPLE. They had tons of multi-colored markers. Rex had also made stencils of lines from some of his poems and was using paint to apply those. Their booth was actually pretty popular. I had totally forgotten about how this fit nicely into the tattoo scene, which is very big in Seattle. And then at one point, the line for face-painting really long and a number of moms successfully convinced them to draw butterflies, flowers, and dolphins on kids’ cheeks. And yes, I had my husband write on me. John wrote a line from a love poem he’d written for me on my upper arm. It was a fun day.

I am hoping that he will write something soon and I don’t have to Spock nag him too much. 😉

Stay tuned.

P.S. For those of you keeping score at home, his work situation has improved somewhat and more importantly, he is taking off both Thanksgiving and Christmas weeks!

George Lakoff has retired as Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley. He is now Director of the Center for the Neural Mind & Society (cnms.berkeley.edu).